[P2P-F] Truth-out : #OccupyWallStreet Is More Than a Hashtag

Sat Sep 24 10:27:24 CEST 2011

Well said!

On 24 September 2011 10:23, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

> thanks Amaia, yes, makes a lot of sense, to go to the deeper convergence
> rather than who said what with 'legitimate' authority ...
>
> Michel
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Amaia Arcos <amaia.arcos at googlemail.com>wrote:
>
>> Super accurate (about the intricacies of all the groups involved), super
>> true.
>>
>> My only comment is that the whole confusion and people either attributing
>> ownership or trying to take it are the new dynamics we have to learn how to
>> deal with in this new nascent age of horizontalism.
>>
>> I am involved in (one of) the 15M international organisation groups and
>> you get the whole "who has said this/done that", "is this official" etc, the
>> answer is always "if it is in line with what we are doing of course it is
>> *official". *There is no official anymore, that is the beauty of it, it
>> is also the problem, the masses "police" stuff, it's like anonymous decision
>> making, if it catches on, it is "officially supported", if it does not, try
>> again and more in line with general consensus.. :)
>>
>> No?
>>
>>
>> On 24 September 2011 10:01, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>wrote:
>>
>>> hi Amia, any comments?
>>>
>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>> From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
>>> Date: Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 3:41 AM
>>> Subject: Truth-out : #OccupyWallStreet Is More Than a Hashtag
>>> To: econowmix at googlegroups.com
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.truth-out.org/occupywallstreet-more-hashtag-its-revolution-formation/1316784846
>>>
>>> http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution
>>>
>>> #OccupyWallStreet Is More Than a Hashtag - It's Revolution in Formation
>>> Friday 23 September 2011
>>>  by: Nathan Schneider, Truthout | Report
>>>
>>>
>>> #OccupyWallStreet protesters gathering in New York's financial
>>> district on September 17, 2011. (Photo: David Shankbone / Flickr<http://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone/6157852302/>
>>> )
>>>
>>> A lot of what you've probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet
>>> action is wrong, especially if you're getting it on the Internet. The action
>>> started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still
>>> spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it
>>> is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person.
>>> That's where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement.
>>>
>>> At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around
>>> computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a
>>> humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour livestream<http://livestream.com/globalrevolution>.
>>> They can edit and post videos of arrests in no time flat, then bombard
>>> Twitter until they're viral. But for those looking to understand even the
>>> basic facts about what is actually going on - before September 17 and since
>>> - the Internet has been as much a source of confusion as it is anything
>>> else.
>>>
>>> For someone who has been following this movement in gestation as well as
>>> implementation, it's painfully easy to see which news articles take their
>>> bearing entirely from a few Google searches. Some reporters come to Liberty
>>> Plaza looking for Adbusters staff, or US Day of Rage members, or
>>> conspiratorial Obama supporters, or hackers from Anonymous. They're briefly
>>> disappointed to find none of the above. Instead, it's a bunch of people -
>>> from round-the-clock revolutionaries, to curious tourists, to retirees, to
>>> zealous students - spending most of their time in long meetings about
>>> supplying food, conducting marches, dividing up the plaza's limited space
>>> and what exactly they're there to do and why. And that's the point. More
>>> than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding
>>> Wall Street what real democracy looks like<http://wagingnonviolence.org/2011/09/the-demand-is-a-process/>:
>>> a discussion among people, not a contest of money.
>>>
>>> As is now well known, the anti-consumerist group Adbusters made a call
>>> on July 13<http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html> for
>>> an occupation of Wall Street. That and a bit of poster art were the extent
>>> of its involvement. Adbusters floated the meme and left the rest to others.
>>> The trouble was, though, that most of the others were meme floaters, too.
>>>
>>> The occupywallst.org web domain was registered anonymously on July 14,
>>> and it soon became the main clearinghouse for information about the
>>> movement’s progress. It remains so now and is getting, on average, about
>>> 50,000 unique visitors per day. It’s maintained mainly by a man and woman
>>> who met through the Anarchism section on the web site Reddit.
>>>
>>> Soon came US Day of Rage, the project of Alexa O'Brien, an IT content
>>> management strategist. Since March, she has been trying to build a
>>> nationwide movement for radical campaign-finance reform - "One citizen. One
>>> dollar. One vote." - and decided to peg her efforts to the September 17
>>> action. While she has around 20 organizers working with her in cities around
>>> the country, as far as one leading #occupywallstreet organizer in New York
>>> could tell, it seems like her only colleagues might be coffee and
>>> cigarettes.
>>>
>>> Then, of course, there's Anonymous. The most-wanted hacker-activist
>>> collective indicated that it would join #occupywallstreet in late August.
>>> Within days, the Anons' presence in the movement was being felt through
>>> Anonymous-branded viral videos, the bombardment of the movement's Twitter
>>> hashtags (of which there is an ever-growing number) and rumors of scrutiny
>>> from Homeland Security.
>>>
>>> Meanwhile, quietly, a group of several hundred mainly young activists,
>>> artists and students started gathering as a "General Assembly" (GA) - a
>>> leaderless, consensus-based decision-making process. They met weekly in
>>> public parks, starting on August 2 and continuing until the occupation
>>> began, with the intention of building an  organizational and tactical
>>> framework for the action. It grew out of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts,
>>> which had recently held a three-week occupation near City Hall called
>>> "Bloombergville" to protest against austerity measures. They had learned a
>>> lot from that and were ready to try something bigger.
>>>
>>> The GA formed an Internet Committee, which quickly became fraught with
>>> infighting about process, security concerns and editorial control. These
>>> problems consumed hours and hours of the whole Assembly's time. Their site
>>> went up, then down and then finally up again just days before the occupation
>>> began. It is now online at nycga.cc, but it receives only a small
>>> fraction of the traffic of occupywallst.org. Only on Thursday afternoon
>>> did the two sites figure out how to formally coordinate their activities.
>>>
>>> As a result of these hiccups, in the lead-up and early days of the
>>> occupation, media coverage almost always associated it with meme floaters
>>> like Adbusters, US Day of Rage and Anonymous. But none of them were
>>> especially responsible for what would be happening on the ground starting on
>>> September 17. That was the GA's doing.
>>>
>>> Others, it seems, have taken it upon themselves to fill the GA's media
>>> vacuum of their own accord. One document beingcirculated and discussed<http://openletters2you.blogspot.com/2011/09/open-letter-to-occupywallstreet.html> online
>>> is "Occupy Wall Street - Official Demands," dated September 20 of *2013*,
>>> which includes detailed proposals for reforming the financial system, none
>>> of which has been approved by the GA.
>>>
>>> "This is definitely not ours," says Marisa Holmes, a facilitator of the
>>> GA since the first planning meetings. "All decisions made by the GA are made
>>> in this space."
>>>
>>> Worse, thanks to some imaginative theorizing by Aaron Kein of the
>>> right-wing online publication WorldNetDaily, the idea began circulating that
>>> the movement was "closely tied" with ACORN, SEIU and that it took its
>>> inspiration from the Weather Underground; George Soros; and, ultimately,
>>> President Obama himself. Five minutes at a GA meeting would easily disabuse
>>> one of such associations. The GA had no official organizational ties and,
>>> besides a food fund that has been stuck in an inaccessible WePay account,
>>> almost no money. Many wish that they had the support of unions, but so far
>>> they still don't.
>>>
>>> What's actually underway at Liberty Plaza is both simpler and more
>>> complicated: music making, sign drawing, talking, organizing, eating,
>>> marching, standoffs with police and (not enough) sleeping. It's a movement
>>> in formation. As protesters sometimes like to chant, "This Is Just
>>> Practice." There are a handful of guys with Anonymous Guy Fawkes masks
>>> backward on their heads, but they're just one affinity group among many.
>>> O'Brien didn't appear on the plaza for a couple of days - she was "running
>>> the back-end," she says - and there has been almost no talk of "One citizen.
>>> One dollar. One vote." Adbusters sends the occasional package of posters in
>>> the mail and offers confusing advice to organizers on the ground. Nobody's
>>> exactly sure yet who is doing what, but they're learning.
>>>
>>> For the most part, the occupation is riding the momentum started in the
>>> GA meetings that were going on for a month and a half beforehand. They built
>>> a community of people who trust each other, who have a sense for each
>>> other's skills and who are in some basic agreement about ends and means.
>>>
>>> In the revolutions and uprisings and occupations that have been taking
>>> place around the world since the beginning of this year, there has been a
>>> lot of talk about the mobilizing power of social media - of the Twitters and
>>> Facebooks and cell phones. But when the Egyptian government shut down the
>>> Internet and the cellular signals in January, the movement there carried on.
>>> One of the deciding factors that brought down Mubarak, in the end, was not
>>> some new Twitter hashtag, but a general strike organized by traditional
>>> labor unions. The Internet can help (as well as hurt) a movement, but it's
>>> no replacement for actual relationships among actual people, building actual
>>> trust through actually working together over a period of time.
>>>
>>> "I could have a political discussion just on the Internet," says web
>>> developer Drew Hornbein, who is on the GA's Internet Committee, "But it's
>>> nice to get out like this." When he started attending GA meetings in August,
>>> he got excited, thinking, "This is something really real. This could really
>>> be something."
>>>
>>> So it has become. But everyone at Liberty Plaza knows the movement has to
>>> be bigger for it to have the effect they want to see. Whole swaths of
>>> Americans - from racial minorities to disgruntled Wall Streeters - are
>>> underrepresented among the occupiers. Not everyone, it seems, is quite so
>>> glued to Twitter as the young radical set. They've had to start scrambling
>>> to relearn how to make fliers, reach out to membership organizations and
>>> find people where they are to make the movement's numbers grow.
>>>
>>> On Thursday evening, a surprise march of hundreds mourning the execution
>>> of Troy Davis in Georgia set out for Liberty Plaza from Union Square, led by
>>> occupiers. Police made attempts to stop it with barricades and clubs and
>>> arrests, but they couldn't; and when the marchers arrived, the numbers in
>>> the plaza swelled. There were a lot of new faces and new kinds of faces. It
>>> paid off to quit the Internet, go to where people actually are and bring
>>> them back.
>>>
>>> In the GA that night, Ted Actie, who lives in Brooklyn and works for On
>>> the Spot, a minority-owned talk-show production company, called on the
>>> protesters to speak more directly to the communities around them. "You do so
>>> much social networking," he said, "you forget how to socialize."
>>> [image: Creative Commons License]<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/>
>>>
>>> This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons
>>> Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/>
>>> .
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  -
>>> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>>
>>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
>>> http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
>>>
>>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> “We would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if
>> we moved continuously on foot across the surface of the earth” Bruce Chatwin
>>
>
>
>
> --
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
> http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
>
> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
>

-- 
“We would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we
moved continuously on foot across the surface of the earth” Bruce Chatwin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20110924/ca8f5e85/attachment.htm 